Doug would you mind scrolling back a bit and find my question about the auto-helm.
Must have gotten lost.
I think it is an important point because the standard auto-helms don't handle weather very well, I have experienced that myself on several boats.
Wind-vanes are the traditional solutions but look like a lot of gear to me.
Your solution is using a commercial quality unit may be a good solution for a lot of people.
How much was it?

I changed the names of all major characters, and also changed at least one thing about them so they would not be possible to track down - I don't want any hassels. The ages, personalities, genders and appearances - all the things central to the story - are as they were in real life. Jon, Tweety and Duffy exist with those names (Duffy of course passed away about a year after I met him).

The only people I kept in touch with (via internet) are "Joyce" and "Doug." Both are still working and as of a year ago both sail, although Doug is now 71.

I made both aware of the book and Joyce is cool with the fact that she took the original photograph that was used to create the cover image. However, neither has commented to me on the book. Sorry!

The relatively minor characters, like Megan and Loukia, and probably unaware of the book - I don't have a means of reaching them. It is possible Joyce told them.

I had a vision a while ago of Joyce, Doug, Megan, Loukia and I all appearing on . . . Oprah! Wouldn't that be fun? Of course, the book will have to be a lot more popular than it is now! If sales really take off a big publisher may decide to contract for distribution and that would get it into brick-and-mortar stores. Just dreamin'!

No worries! I was just curious.

Thanks again for the read, it was great. I imagine you could show up on Oprah or, even better, end up with your own reality TV show with all of you on a boat again

There was a scene in the book where the anchor had to be raised. Joyce refused to do that job and insisted on helming.
She almost crashed the boat.
I usually do the anchor duty as my wife really can't, knee problems.
This is a tough one.
In Glenn's case Joyce had a really bad attitude about everything.
But even so It is a risk I always think about.
Is it safer to do both bow and stern myself or safer to put someone who may not be that competent or confident on the helm.
It is a tough call?

Glen you mentioned on the book that you built a plywood box for the refrigerator evaporator and that it has a fan on it. Was that in the engine room?
Would you elaborate on that install.
How did it work out.

Right - I tried to make a "cool box" around the compressor-evaporator.

The boat was made in 1977 with two thinly insulated ice boxes. Someone had once put a cold plate and the associated mechanics into the aft icebox. When I bought the boat that unit was just a solid block of rust - would not turn on.

I pulled it all out and replaced it with a new system from the West Marine catalog ($$$$). The ONLY place I could possibly locate it was on a nice flat area on the port side of the engine room. Of course, the engine room is the worst place to locate a compressor-evaporator.

The manufacturer sold a "ventilation kit" consisting of a fan and tubular air ducts, designed to blow cool bilge air on the compressor. But my unit was actually in the ER and inches from the engine itself, so I went one further and build a little "dog house" around the unit, with cool air sucking in from the bilge and blowing out to a mushroom vent located directly overhead. The vent had to be on the afterdeck.

As usual, all this was great in theory, and worked great at the dock, but at sea was another story. The mushroom vent was in a bad spot where people tended to hit it and step on it. Of course, it HAD to be open whenever the reefer was cycling!

In heavy weather seawater would rush past the vent! Unless it was closed tight, water would enter the duct! I had anticipated this and put a U-bend in the duct tube with a small drain hole at the bottom of the U.

The other issue with the reefer was poor insulation. This is the bane with some production boats. I left this part out from the book because the "boatwork" sections were getting too long, but Doug had some experience in doing kitchen counters and he wanted to replace our whole galley countertop, and get rid of the TACKY 1970's fake wood grain plastic crap (imagine how that looked after 30 years).

I went to this on-line company (I forget the name) and purchased all the raw materials to make the reefer box from scratch: fiberglass sheet, VACUUM plate insulation, and a VACUUM insulated door. For your money (and they want a lot of it) you supply them with the exact shape and dimensions of your insulation plates. The plates are something like 1/2 inch thick but because of the vacuum chambers they are equal to 6-8 inches of the best foam insulation.

This was a lot of work but when it was done the whole kit-and-kaboodle (reefer and countertop, glistening white formica) looked and worked great.

Except for the damn vent, the whole system worked great. If anything, it worked too well, freezing stuff we did not want frozen until we learned to dial it way down. Used very little electricity, gave us plenty of real ice, cooled a lot of stuff extremely well. Thanks to the vacuum plates, we could close the vent and open the reefer breaker for 12-24 hours and it would still be cold! Like a thermos bottle, basically. It probably set me back around $4000 total, plus maybe 60 hours of labor, but it worked exceptionally well.

Everyone has to start somewhere, some people have never spent more than a few days on any boat, look down the doc's and 90% of the boats only go out for a few hours at a time and fewer go more than 30 miles off shore.

I loved on a boat traveling all over for two years and pure fact is no matter how bad the weather gets, 75% of all abandoned boats at sea are later found still floating.

He is not a failure for selling his boat he is a hero for doing what most have not done.

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